


Another Lovely Lie

by Rhaella



Category: Firefly, Heroes - Fandom
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-31
Updated: 2008-12-31
Packaged: 2017-10-21 15:00:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/226498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhaella/pseuds/Rhaella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Things may or may not have changed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Another Lovely Lie

**Author's Note:**

> Because they both have collected more names and spouses than they know what to do with. Season 3 never happened (or someone time travelled back and fixed it, if you prefer). Centuries later, the RCRs are in the Firefly ‘Verse, for better or for worse.

“We’re married now,” she says, entwining their fingers together.

There’s a breathless quality to her voice, as if this is such a beautiful and wondrous thing that she can’t quite believe it. An understandable sentiment, since this marriage literally came out of nowhere, and he would be reeling with confusion if he weren’t all too accustomed to this sort of thing. Her eyes are wide with innocence – fake innocence, he can tell, because he’s long since decided that nobody in the ‘Verse can look like _that_ and mean it.

Still, she’s lovely enough that right now he can’t bring himself to care. He’s played this game before, and he doesn’t mind playing it again.

Raising an eyebrow, he bites back a laugh. “Isn’t that nice?”

* * *

He doesn’t swear in Chinese.

Rather, he doesn’t swear exclusively in Chinese. There are at least a dozen languages she can’t identify locked up inside that head of his, and she’s never fully certain which one will emerge whenever he opens his mouth. Usually English, of course, spoken in that fancy accent that almost reminds her of the core worlds, but sometimes…

Sometimes not.

She isn’t here for the money, she knows, or for some simple scheme that she can carry out at her leisure. (Well, not yet, at least.) She’s here because she can recognize a secret when she sees one, and can easily tell that his is larger than any she has ever before come across.

She has spun too many mysteries to fully avoid being caught up in one such as this.

He’s asleep beside her, but she runs her fingers down the side of his arm anyway. Softly, she murmurs, “Who are you really, Michael?”

* * *

Michael.

A new name for a new reality, for a world where everything is possible, even if nothing has truly changed. He hasn’t been Adam for centuries. Perhaps he never was.

“Even the eldest of men is still a man,” Gabriel – who was once Sylar, who was once Gabriel Gray – had once told him, and he had accepted the truth of those words. Adam, immortal or not, had still been ruled by a human perspective, by the despair that comes from simultaneously trying to live both inside and outside of time itself.

Michael has no such flaw.

Gabriel had been amused by the choice of name. “The defender of humanity, the angel of _mercy_?” His lips had quirked into that unpleasant smirk he long ago perfected. “How _ironic_.”

“He who is like unto God,” Claire – even when using other names, she has never been anything else – had laughed. “You’re no archangel, _Adam_ ,” she had said, clinging to the old name, as if by doing otherwise she might forfeit her own identity. “Perhaps you used to be a Lucifer, but now you don’t care enough to be much of anything at all.”

And he had been forced to recognize the truth of those words as well. Names have always been a human concern, the use of which reveals more about those speaking them than the ones to whom they refer.

Perhaps he has outgrown the need for any name at all.

* * *

“Michael, what do you see when you look up at the sky?” she asks, her fingers drawing lazy circles across his chest. She doesn’t much care what words he might use to reply; her answer will be found in all the small things that go unsaid.

For a long moment, however, he says nothing at all.

Earth-that-was, perhaps, as it once had been, long before everything he had feared finally came to pass. Before humanity had destroyed it and then scattered across the stars, too well entrenched now for any simple cure. Perhaps one day, his former efforts will prove unnecessary. Perhaps they _will_ still annihilate themselves as well. Perhaps even now they have somewhere sown the seeds of their own destruction…

But he doubts that it will ever come to fruition. These things seldom do.

The others don’t believe him, but the others are still too young to understand.

Nothing ever changes.

But when he looks up at the heavens like this, it is like looking into the past. He would not be able to point out Earth-that-was, but he knows that it’s there, its ancient light serving as a reminder of what they had once had. Painted against the night sky, light-years away and centuries ago, he wonders if he can still be seen living on that world he left behind - a bundle of light and memory that proves that nothing can ever be fully erased.

He glances aside and shrugs at the woman lying next to him, and all he says is: “A million dying stars.”

* * *

She can play a thousand different roles.

There are as many people inside of her as beyond, and none of them is half as real as a fairytale. She plays caricatures more often than characters – base mockeries of humanity that would be a slap to the face of anyone perceptive enough to notice. Most men are horrified when they discover this, as if her carefully tailored personalities are objects that they can possess, the loss of which strikes them as a betrayal worse than a knife to the back.

But Michael – though she recognizes that he is no more a Michael than she a Yolanda, a Saffron, or a Bridget – is different.

He recognizes her masks for what they are, and doesn’t seem to care.

Perhaps she doesn’t realize that reality has long since lost any appeal for him. Perhaps she can’t tell that after hundreds of years of painful attachments, a wife who is more fiction than fact is a pleasant change. Perhaps she doesn’t understand that if he wished the company of those whose existences are as certain as his own, he would simply leave.

Then again, perhaps she does.

* * *

“Who would you like me to be tonight?” she murmurs, her lips hot against his skin. She has no need for a identity of her own when with him. For her, names have ever been fluid, more a convenience than a necessity, and he has gifted her with more than enough.

She has worn so many masks that she no longer knows what – if anything – lies beneath.

“Angelica,” he replies after half a moment’s thought. Angelica, one of his long dead wives, who had remained with him through everything, good and ill. Angelica, who had all the same proved that no human life, no matter how long or fully lived, can ever be enough.

“Angelica,” repeats his new wife, who would betray him on a moment’s whim. “What was she like?”

“She was… very beautiful,” is all he manages to say. He can no longer remember anything more.

* * *

At some point, it always happens.

He always cuts himself, or break a bone, or get into a fight he should not have won, and then…

Then they always learn the truth.

“Love, what’s wrong?” she asks, poking her head through the doorway into the room where he’s playing at being a mechanic.

“Nothing at all,” he assures her, holding his bloody but unharmed hand carefully out of her view.

And she smiles, and she says nothing.

* * *

At the end of things, however, she presses her lips against his and whispers, “I love you.” It’s a beautiful sentiment for a beautiful story, but no more true than anything else in this charade has been.

He can’t taste the poison, but he knows it’s there.

And it has no effect, but he lets himself collapse all the same. No point in stopping this game early, he decides. Better to play it through to the end.

She leaves, and he wonders what she’s taken with her. He wonders how much she knows. He briefly considers vengeance, but almost immediately decides against it. That was the concern of a different man, in another life, on a long dead world.

Nothing lasts forever.


End file.
